This is part 2 of a series about inclusion. This’ll all make more sense if you begin with part 1 here.
Just want to be clear here from the outset. I’m not saying that it’s always the best thing for people with disabilities to be with their mainstream classmates all the time.
What you’re supposed to do is look at the nature of the disability. And how severe it is. And then decide what sort of environment is appropriate. And again, the law says “least restrictive environment.” In other words, if you’re Tess’s special ed crew, if you’re the IEP Team and you’re making decisions about Tess’s school day, you look at her. You think about where she is socially. Cognitively. What she can understand when people speak to her. How she communicates, with her device or nonverbal stuff like movements and faces and gestures. If you’re that IEP Team, you look at the whole person. All of Tess. And then based on her disability, figure out how much of the time she should be with her classmates.
Remember from my previous post—that decision is written down. It’s in Tess’s IEP. It’s a number. A percentage. The IEP Team decided that our Tess should be with her classmates 75% of the time. And that other 25% of the time is when her disability’s nature and severity require that she be away from them, doing things like attending her individual therapies.
Here’s an example. Her fourth-grade classmates take Spanish. Which is great for them. Get started early in school, be fluent by senior year. I’m a huge believer in that. I started learning French in fifth grade. Got super into it. Kept going all the way through 12th grade. Majored in French in college. So I’m totally into the language thing. But is a Spanish class the right thing for Tess at this point? Not really. Her communication skills aren’t at a level where learning a foreign language would be appropriate. It would be a waste of her time. So when her peers take Spanish, Tess does something else. Because her language deficits require it. Make sense?
So in my first post, I was telling you about a meeting at Tess’s school. It wasn’t an official IEP meeting. Just an informal one. Why does it matter what we call it—whether it’s official or not? Well, if it’s an IEP meeting, then certain folks are required to be there and notes are taken and whatever decisions are made become part of her IEP, a legal document. If it’s informal, we can invite whoever the heck we want and just talk things over and nothing’s really binding on anyone.
At this informal meeting with us are her special ed teacher and her ed techs, her speech pathologist from the school, and we also invite Tess’s outside speech pathologist, who we bring her to after school once a week.
We start by saying we feel like Tess’s communication has kinda stalled. She uses a system called PECS. From what we’ve seen, she made great progress with PECS at first, moving quickly through the various stages, but she’s basically been in the same place for two years. But we hear a different perspective from those working with her at the school these days. They say she’s making great progress, in her receptive language skills, the kind that are all about receiving language from others. And her impulse control and her patience have both improved immensely.
This is an interesting way of looking at it. We agree to some new strategies that will help her with her expressive language — the kind that she initiates. I hope to have more about this in the weeks to come.
Then, in this meeting, they are showing us a time when Tess interacted with a classmate. That classmate was doing some work at a desk, and Tess came in close to him, as she often does these days. And there were a couple of photos of her with him at his desk, like doing stuff. Thing is, her special ed teacher is jumping up and down to us about how amazing this was. How Tess had this interaction and we took pictures, and here are the pictures. But this sort of interaction used to happen at least every day in previous years. We'd get a pic like that from her K-2 special ed teacher in her daily email, with a different kid each time interacting with Tess. On the playground. Or in the gym. All over the school. So why are we going bananas over this, celebrating something that should be happening every hour, if not every day?
And it’s at this point that we learn that they aren’t really doing that inclusion thing. The 75% on her IEP? Yeah, they’re not doing that. They’re apologetic and all. But they fully acknowledge that they’re keeping Tess in the special ed room, away from her class, for a huge part of the day. Not even close to the 75% amount we’d agreed on. They tell us they’re going to do it from now on.